Degree Project
Level: Bachelor’s
A Psychoanalytical Study on the Importance of Skin Tone in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye
Author: Sandra De Freitas Supervisor: Billy Gray
Examiner: Carmen Zamorano Llena
Subject/main field of study: English (literature) Course code: EN2048
Credits: 15 ECTS
Date of examination: 30 May 2019
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Freud's Structural Model of the Psyche ... 8
The Light-skinned Girl ... 9
The Brown-skinned Girl ... 11
The Dark-skinned Girl ... 14
Conclusion ... 17
Works Cited ... 20
Introduction
There are several different social factors that impact on the development of young women and their understanding of the world and themselves. Young girls are regularly compelled to reexamine their appearance and are faced with illustrations of women who look nothing like them. Although numerous young women struggle with the beauty standard that is set by society, young black girls deal with this struggle both outside and within the black community. This struggle can be seen in Toni Morrison's novel The Bluest Eye. The author exposes how the white standard of beauty influences black girls' perception of their own beauty, but also how the standard of being light-skinned in the black community creates further issues. In other words, young black women suffer from both racism and colorism.
A significant amount of the academic work that has been written about The Bluest Eye tends to focus on the theme of racism as it exists in the novel.
The reason why earlier work tends to focus more on racism than on the colorist aspect is that colorism in various cases is overshadowed by racism. Margaret Hunter describes colorism as “The process of discrimination that privileges light-skinned people of color over their dark-skinned counterparts” (Hunter 237). The distinction between racism and colorism is that racism discriminates against individuals based on the level of racial category while colorism discriminates individuals based on their skin tone. Hunter states that both systems are distinct but inextricably connected and describes this in the following way: “A light-skinned Mexican American may still experience racism, despite her light skin, and a dark-skinned Mexican American may experience racism and colorism simultaneously. Racism is a larger, systemic, social process and colorism is one manifestation of it” (Hunter 238). As Hunter states a dark-skinned person experiences both racism and colorism,
light-skinned black people are privileged over darker-skinned black people both inside and outside of the black community. According to Hunter the creation of skin- color hierarchies for African Americans dates back to the American system of chattel slavery. Hunter explains that “Slave owners used skin color as a basis to divide enslaved Africans for work chores and to create distrust and animosity among them, minimizing chances for revolt. This early skin color hierarchy has persisted in the African American community” (Hunter 177). The fact that the skin color hierarchy has persisted in the black community is the reason why colorism is still a problem today. Although colorism is mainly about skin-color it is important to note that it also includes other aspects of physical appearance. Blacks with features that are closer to or resemble those of whites are viewed as superior and more attractive than blacks with darker-skin and typical Afro look. According to Lillie M. Fears, the research made by Russell, Wilson, and Hall about African Americans and color complex found that the typical Afro look along with dark skin is viewed in a negative light. These features are characterized as dark skin, broad nose, full lips, and kinky hair. Russell, Wilson, and Hall (qtd. in Fears) states that “The psychological fixation surrounding colorism has led to many blacks to discriminate against one another for decades, and because it has long been considered unmentionable it has been called the last Taboo among blacks” (30). It is important to bear in mind that although there exist different categories in which people are classified according to their skin tone, these differences are not always clear. As Kaitlyn Greenidge explains in her article, colorism is about self-perception and what category a person might be considered to fall under varies depending on their social surroundings. Greenidge states that Margaret Hunter noted that different communities define it differently “The best research tends to use the color palette to ask people how they see themselves.
Because whether or not you say you’re light skin or dark skin is relative to your social context and that varies by what kind of community you live in.” (qtd. in Greenidge). A person that is considered light skinned in one region might be considered dark or brown skinned in another and vice versa.
In Toni Morrison's novel, the theme of colorism can be understood through the way that the light-skinned black people are portrayed and other character’s reaction to them. One example of this can be seen in the characters of Maureen Peal and Pecola Breedlove. Both Maureen and Pecola are two young black girls with very different skin tones from each other. Maureen is a lighter skinned girl and cherished by everyone, including white people, in spite of not being as high in the racial hierarchy as white girls. Therefore, she is viewed as superior to Pecola who is a dark-skinned girl. Though white people favor Maureen over Pecola it is black people that keep reinforcing the narrative that she is superior and keep her on a pedestal. In this sense, colorism comes more from the black community than it does from the white. Maureen’s light skin is a privilege when she is compared to Pecola but next to white girls she is still seen as less worthy and can still be subjected to racism. Unlike Maureen, Pecola is not only affected by racism, but she is also affected by colorism. Pecola faces prejudice based on her race by the white society and bigotry based on her skin tone by the African American community.
In their article, Maxine S. Thompson and Verna M. Keith affirm that researchers, among others Bond, Cash and Boyd Franklin, have found that “At the social-psychological level, studies find that skin color is related to feelings of self- worth and attractiveness, self-control, satisfaction, and quality of life” (qtd. in Thompson and Keith). The fact that skin color is related to feelings of self-worth and attractiveness makes black women more vulnerable to colorism than black men.
This creates a different response to colorism between the genders and leads to darker skinned black women having lower self-esteem than dark- skinned men. Thompson and Keith explain that one of the reasons why colorism affects dark-skinned women more than their male counterparts is due to the association it conveys when it comes to gender. Dark skin tone for men is associated with danger, criminality, and competence while for women it is associated with attractiveness. This makes it easier for dark-skinned men to compensate for their dark skin by getting higher education or a high paying job, “Educational attainment is a vehicle by which men might overcome skin color bias, but changes in physical features are difficult to accomplish” (Thompson and Keith 340). As stated above, skin tone and attractiveness are closely related and both in the white and black community lighter skin is viewed as more attractive than darker skin. This leads to darker-skinned women being viewed as less attractive even if they try to overcome skin color bias in the same way dark-skinned men do. Another cause for why dark-skinned women have lower self-worth is what Thompson and Keith call a “Triple jeopardy” situation meaning that “Black women face problems of racism and sexism, and when these two negative statuses positions being black and being female combine with colorism, a triple threat lowers self-esteem and feelings of competence among dark Black women” (Thompson and Keith 340). The aspect of triple jeopardy can be seen in The Bluest Eye if Pecola Breedlove is compared to her father Cholly Breedlove, although both of them are dark-skinned and subjected to racism. Pecola’s father is dominating at home and projects the inferiority he goes through in white society onto his wife and children. Cholly is powerless in white society but because he is a male, he has advantages over black women both in the white as well as in the black community.
As demonstrated above, colorism is a societal problem and can be seen in social relations, but it can also manifest itself in other areas such as language. JeffriAnne Wilder examined the language of colorism in her article and found that terms that describe darker skin tend to be more derogatory than those that describe lighter skin.
She explains that sociologist K. Sue Jewell found that “From the early 1630s to the present, black American women of all shades have been portrayed as hypersexual
“bad-black-girls”. Consequently, the names given to black women by larger society incorporate food metaphors” (qtd. in Wilder). These terms have stayed in the black community and are used to describe black women of different skin tones even today.
Although all terms have a sexist and racist background, terms that describe darker skin tend to be more insulting. As Wilder states: “Names such as burnt, charcoal, and watermelon child point to the historical bias toward being dark and reinforce controlling images of dark-skinned black women. These labels continue to signify negativity and inferiority, standing in stark contrast to the favorable labels of light skin” (Wilder 191). Even in language, therefore, colorism always favors light- skinned blacks over dark-skinned. The terms used for describing lighter skinned included terms such as Carmel, French Vanilla and pretty skin, and although all of these terms have sexist attachments, they are not as severe as the terms used for describing dark-skin. The language of colorism is used on a daily basis and dark- skinned girls are often ridiculed or described by the terms mentioned above.
As previously mentioned, there are not many academic sources that have been written about The Bluest Eye and the theme of colorism that exists in the novel. Seema Bashir’s article is one of the few that has concentrated on the colorist aspect. In her article, Bashir gives an explanation of the colorist features that can be found in the novel by focusing on beauty and explaining that Hollywood has been a
major contributing factor to colorism in America, meaning that the lack of black females or males in the film industry failed to provide an icon young black people could relate to. Bashir argues that, “African-American Society in America has, over the years of exploitation, come to accept the European Standards of beauty and thus they hold an apologetic view about themselves. Appropriation to the white ideals is desired” (Bashir 526). She shows how the concept of white beauty contributes to colorism by giving an example of how the children in Toni Morrison's novel are affected by the white beauty standard from a very early stage by their mothers. An example is Claudia, who is given a white doll that everyone expects her to love and look up too. As Bashir explains, the mothers themselves have grown up with the idea that white is superior to black and therefore project that concept onto their own daughters. One of the major icons all black women in the novel seem to idolize is Shirley Temple. Although Claudia questions why she is given a white doll and is unable to comprehend why everyone in her surroundings is obsessed with Shirley Temple, she commences feeling the pressure of looking whiter or having lighter- skinned. Seema Bashir’s paper gives an overall explanation of how colorism operates in Toni Morrison's novel and, like a great deal of literature that is written about colorism, it focuses on dark-skinned vs light skinned, however there is a lack of analysis of what it means to fall in the middle of the color spectrum, the second category that exists in the colorist hierarchy called “brown-skinned”. Bashir fails to explain how having different skin tones affects the girls in different ways. How, although Claudia experiences colorism, it is in a different way than Pecola does.
Academic work that has been written about The Bluest Eye from a psychoanalytic perspective includes Ding Yang and Xiangguo Kong’s paper in which, Ding and Kong demonstrate the mental suffering white society causes blacks
by analyzing the life track of the Breedloves in accordance with Jacques Lacan’s theory about the mirror stage. According to Ding and Kong, the Breedloves are,
“Mentally forced to linger in their prolonged mirror stage and this is just the reason for their self-splitting. The Breedloves are stuck in the permanent contradiction of the Mirror Stage, and the insurmountable conflict between their ideal ego and their real-life sets the tone for their tragic life” (Ding and Kong 298). Even though their paper demonstrates how Racism affects the mental health of the Breedloves, it fails to demonstrate or even mention the role colorism and the black community play in reinforcing and increasing suffering to the Breedloves. As stated previously the work that has been written about colorism in The Bluest Eye, such as in Samira Bashir’s essay, fails to include how colorism affects young women who fall in the middle of the color spectrum and show how their experiences differ from those of a darker skin tone and from a psychoanalytical perspective there is a lack in the analysis of the role that colorism has in affecting black people’s perception of themselves. When using the term colorism, the definition that will be applied is from the writer and activist Alice Walker, who was the first to use the term and defined it as “prejudicial or preferential treatment of same-race people based solely on their colour” (qtd. in Bashir).
This essay argues that skin tone affects black girls’ perception of themselves not only on a social level but at a psychological level as well, which is one reason why a psychoanalytical approach will be used. The essay will focus on Freud's beliefs that events in childhood have a great influence on shaping the personality and examine how colorism affects three young black girls in the novel The Bluest Eye both on an unconscious and conscious level. Freud's tripartite system of the mind, the id, the ego, and the superego, provides a lens into the characters
minds and this analysis will attempt to show how colorism impacts upon the workings of these three categories of their minds.
Freud's Structural Model of the Psyche
In the book Beginning Theory by Peter Barry, he writes that “Psychoanalytical criticism is a form of literary criticism which uses some of the techniques of psychoanalysis in the interpretation of literature” (Barry 92). Barry distinguishes between psychoanalysis and psychoanalytical criticism by explaining that the first is a form of therapy which aims to cure mental disorders by examining the connection of the conscious and the unconscious elements in the mind. This is done by allowing the patient to speak freely in order for the repressed fears and conflicts that are causing harm for the patient to be brought to the conscious mind instead of remaining in the unconscious. This form of practicing therapy is based upon Sigmund Freud's theories of how the mind, the instinct and sexuality work.
According to Freud early stressful experiences in childhood affect the development of the human mind. Barry explains Freud’s model of the psyche in the following way, “Freud suggested a three-part, rather than a two-part, mode of the psyche, dividing it into the ego, the super-ego, and the id, these three levels of the personality roughly corresponding to, respectively, the consciousness, the conscience, and the unconscious” (Barry 93). Karl M. Bowman states in his article that according to Freud, “The id represents the earliest organization of the mental life of the individual and contains within itself the emotional and instinctive forces” (Bowman 644). The id lies in the unconscious part of the mind and operates based on the pleasure principle and basic needs. It operates in an impulsive manner and demands satisfaction even if that satisfaction has consequences. When this part of the psyche
and its demands are not granted, human beings experience this rejection as a painful experience because their own basic and instinctive needs are not met. The development of the ego and superego functions to regulate the impulsive and instinctive part of the id. Freud defines the ego as, “That part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world” (qtd. in Bowman). The ego regulates between the id’s instinctive demands and the external world. In opposition to the id the ego functions according to logic and reason, whereas the id functions based on impulsive and instinctive demands without taking into consideration objective reality. Bowman explains that the superego is formed from the primary identification with the parent. “The super-ego corresponds in many respects to conscience and from it are derived religion, morality, and a social sense”
(Bowman 644). The superego consists of two systems, these being the conscience and the ideal self. The conscience functions as a way to regulate the ego to not submit to the demands of the id and the ideal self-represent what an individual should strive for in their life. According to Freud, “Mental conflict is essentially a conflict between the ego and id-impulses, albeit this conflict is regarded as mainly due to the pressure exerted by the superego upon the ego.” (qtd. in Fairbairn).
The Light-skinned Girl
Maureen Peal is a light-skinned young black girl who is new to the neighborhood and represents the blacks who belong to the upper-class. She becomes the most popular girl in school and is treated better than darker-skinned black girls, both by white and black people, “Black boys didn’t trip her in the halls; white boys didn’t stone her, white girls didn’t suck their teeth when she was assigned to be their work partners; black girls stepped aside when she wanted to use the sink in the girls’ toilet,
and their eyes genuflected under sliding lids” (Morrison 62). This demonstrates how the black community puts light skinned people on a pedestal. Although white people do not harass Maureen, they do not feel the need to step aside and answer to Maureen’s demands as other black girls in school do when she wants to use the sink.
The black community reinforces the belief that light-skinned people like Maureen are superior and therefore should be treated with more respect than dark-skinned people. This idea leads Maureen to think that she is better than all other black girls at school and gives her the confidence to do what she wishes, but the sense of superiority is not only accepted by Maureen, as Bashir states, ”This notion is not only harboured by Maureen Peal, but also by the other girls in the school, who by default accept Maureen’s superior position and willingly submit to it”(Bashir 527).
Dark-skinned girls like Pecola and Claudia are made to submit to Maureen’s superiority and when they refuse to do it, they are treated with contempt because Maureen has internalized the idea that they should always respond to her demands.
This can be observed when Maureen is trying to be friends with Pecola. At first, Maureen is being friendly but shifts into asking uncomfortable questions about Pecola’s fathers´ naked body. Maureen is attempting to shame Pecola for seeing her father naked and when Pecola does not want to answer her questions she treats her with contempt. When Maureen does not get the acknowledgment that she wants and when her demands are not met, she starts to insult Pecola and Claudia because of the color of their skin, “I am cute! And you ugly! Black and ugly black e mos. I am cute!” (Morrison 71).
From a psychoanalytical point of view, one can understand Maureen’s reaction as the id not getting its demands and therefore, she experiences this as a painful rejection. She felt that she had the right to get an answer from Pecola
and that Pecola should follow her orders. Just as the id does not take into consideration the consequences of its demands and solely operates from its own needs. In this case, Maureen’s ego failed to regulate the demands of the id in a socially and reasonable way. This failure leads to an unpleasant feeling that her ego is trying to avoid and so she unconsciously employs a defense mechanism by reminding the girls and herself that she is better than them although she behaved in a morally wrong way. Maureen’s skin color, in this case, functions as a tool that she can use against darker-skinned black girls and her skin tone protects her from unpleasant feelings not only on a social level but on a psychological level as well.
As Maxine S. Thompson and Verna M. Keith affirm, at a social- psychological level skin color is related to feelings of self-worth and attractiveness.
Maureen’s skin-color allows her to develop these feelings because the color of her skin gives her status in society and her demands and wishes are always met both from a social and psychological level. Lighter skinned girls like Maureen Peal have the advantage of growing up more confident and having more self-worth than girls with Pecola’s and Claudia’s skin tone. One can, therefore, conclude that Maureen has more advantages to succeed in life and has more stability not only from a social perspective but from a psychological perspective as well. In Maureen’s case, colorism works to her advantage and the color of her skin affects her in a positive way.
The Brown-skinned Girl
Claudia MacTeer is a character who functions as a narrator for certain sections of the novel. Claudia, unlike Maureen, does not have a positive social status in school or in the black community. She is not put on a pedestal and gets no special treatment,
but neither is she harassed. She falls into the middle of the color spectrum. Her skin tone allows her to experience both the privilege of being light skinned and the suffering of being dark skinned. When Claudia is next to Maureen she is regarded as less worthy because she is darker than Maureen but when she is next to Pecola she is considered as superior because she is lighter skinned than Pecola. Claudia feels pressure from both the white and black society to look more like white or light skinned black girls. Although she feels that pressure, her skin tone allows her to
“pass” in certain situations. This experience can be understood based on the response that a young woman of brown skin tone gave in JeffriAnne Wilder’s paper.
The brown-skinned women’s experience with colorism is similar to Claudia’s.
Desiree explains how her skin tone affects her in society in the following way,
“Desiree goes on to explain that for black women, skin color is about the survival of the fittest. Having brown skin deems her better fit than dark women and less fit than light women” (Wilder 199). This feeling of in-betweenness can be seen in Claudia who is aware that Maureen is treated better than both her and Pecola because of the color of her skin and this leads Claudia into feeling jealousy towards Maureen,
“When she was assigned a locker next to mine, I could indulge my jealousy four times a day” (Morrison 62). Claudia, unlike darker skinned women, can escape the negativity that comes with being dark-skinned. This can be seen when some young black boys follow Pecola after school and commence to insult her for being dark- skinned. When Claudia and her sister try to protect Pecola the boys ignore their request “Go on, gal! Ain’t nobody bothering you” (Morrison 81). The boys do not feel the need to insult Claudia and her sister’s skin-color the same way they did with Pecola. As Seema Bashir suggests, “They see her blackness as ugly while being complacent in the thought that they are not as ‘black’ as her or even as contempt for
their own skin color” (527). This shows that the boys do not view their own or Claudia’s skin tone in the same negative way as they view Pecola’s dark skin.
Alhough they threatened to beat Claudia and her sister when standing up for Pecola, they do not mention anything about their skin tones. This shows that Claudia can escape remarks and insults about her skin-color in a way that Pecola cannot.
From a psychoanalytical perspective, one can conclude that the black community functions as the superego’s ideal self, meaning that they view white girls or lighter skinned girls as perfection and something that every black girl should strive to be or look like, even though this goal is unrealistic. This can be understood when Claudia’s parents give her a white doll as a Christmas gift and she does not understand why everyone expects her to love the doll even though it looks nothing like her, “All the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured. Here, they said, this is beautiful, and if you are on this day ‘worthy’ you may have it.” (Morrison 21). Claudia’s ego recognizes that the ideal self that the superego is demanding is unrealistic as she knows that she can never look like the Christmas doll that was given to her. Claudia’s skin tone and her family situation enable her to have different perspectives of society, even though Claudia’s mother reinforces the belief that lighter skin and blue eyes are more beautiful than darker skin. Claudia is still loved at home and her parents show that they care about her and she is also taught other values at home that provide her with psychological balance. An example is the aggression that Claudia feels towards lighter skinned women and white women. On the one hand, her id demands that she acts on that aggression “I destroyed white baby dolls. But the dismembering of dolls was not the true horror. The truly horrifying thing was the transference of the same impulses to little white girls” (Morrison 23). On the other hand, Claudia’s ego is
able to understand that these feelings are not socially acceptable and so her ego employs a defense mechanism in order that the aggression she feels is projected on the white dolls instead of real white girls. In society, she is neither admired nor bullied due to her skin color. This allows Claudia to have a strong mindset and develop feelings of self-worth. Claudia’s ego is able to balance between the id’s aggressive demands and the superego’s unrealistic ideal self. This also permits her to understand that colorism is projected on young black women because of the self- hate that many people in the black community inherited from white racism. This awareness makes Claudia try to help Pecola as she recognizes that the black community uses dark-skinned people as a scapegoat. She states, “We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor” (Morrison 205). In the case of Claudia colorism makes her experience both sides of the spectrum and her brown skin tone affects her development in a way that allows her to see herself and others in a realistic way.
The Dark-skinned Girl
Pecola Breedlove is a dark-skinned young black girl who is very fragile and defenseless. Pecola comes from a broken family, her father is an alcoholic and her mother spends most of her time working for a white family whom she loves more than her own family at home. Pecola is invisible at home. Unlike Claudia, Pecola does not have loving parents. Her mother hated her from the moment she took a look at her in the hospital, “Eyes all soft and wet. A cross between a puppy and a dying man. But I knowed she was ugly. Head full of pretty hair, but Lord she was ugly”
(Morrison 124). As Seema Bashir writes in her analyses “The characters who are
responsible for Pecola’s predicament are themselves caught in the web of same racial profiling” (529). Both Pecola’s mother and father were victims of racist discrimination and they project that onto their daughter.
Outside of her home, Pecola receives the same awful treatment both from the white and black community: “Long hours she sat looking in the mirror, trying to discover the secret of the ugliness, the ugliness that made her ignored or despised at school, by teachers and classmates alike” (Morrison 60). At school nobody really notices her and when they do it is often to insult her. She has no social status like the light skinned girl Maureen. This encourages Pecola to believe in what is said about her both at home and in society.
Pecola’s mother works as a maid at a white family’s house and shows the little white girl she takes care of much love. Pecola sees this affection and internalizes the belief that if she looked the same way as the little white girl her mother loves so much, then her parents and the rest of society would finally be kind towards her, “If she looked different, beautiful, maybe Cholly would be different, and Mrs. Breedlove too. Maybe they’d say, “Why, look at pretty-eyed Pecola. We mustn’t do bad things in front of those pretty eyes” (Morrison 45). Unlike Claudia, Pecola is not taught moral values at home, the values she learns are directly influenced by society. Because people always call her ugly, Pecola develops a desire and need to be beautiful. The images of beauty that she sees in society are of white women and in the black community, she sees how lighter skinned girls like Maureen are considered more beautiful and treated better than girls who look like her. Pecola thus internalizes the belief that if she only had some of the features that white or lighter skinned women have, she would be considered beautiful and so she develops an obsession with having blue eyes.
Analyzing Pecola from a psychoanalytical perspective, one can conclude that the id feels the urgent need of affection which she never received as a child and that Pecola’s ego tries to work out realistic ways of achieving the demands of the id. However, the need to be beautiful is so strong that it keeps Pecola hopeful that one day her wish of having blue eyes will come true: “Each night, without fail, she prayed for blue eyes. Fervently, for a year she had prayed. Although somewhat discouraged, she was not without hope” (Morrison 62). Pecola’s experience can be seen in real life situations, as a brown-skinned girl in JeffriAnne Wilder’s article explains, she did anything to avoid being darker than what she was: “ I would get really dark in the summer time and I would come home and . . . scrub my skin when I was in the shower, so I could get my brown color back . . . cause I didn’t want to be too dark; that’s what was in my mind”(Wilder 16). Pecola’s wish for blue eyes is her way of trying to avoid the negativity that comes with being dark-skinned.
In Pecola’s case, the desire for beauty becomes stronger and her ego is unable to balance between the impulsive demands of the id and the superego fails to influence the ego to act in a socially acceptable way, leading the ego to operate in an unrealistic manner. Pecola seeks out a witch doctor named Soaphead Church, who convinces her that her wish to have blue eyes has been granted, and so her ego has acted based on an unrealistic expectation. Pecola develops a defense mechanism which keeps her in a delusion that her eyes are pretty and blue. At the end of the novel, it is revealed that she has gone insane, as she sits and talks with her imaginary friend while staring at her own imaginary blue eyes. Pecola believes that everyone looks away from her, not because she has gone insane but because they are jealous of her blue eyes, “Ever since I got my blue eyes, she looks away from me all of the time. Do you suppose she’s jealous?” (Morrison 196). Pecola’s skin tone affects her
mentally and socially. From a social point of view, she is viewed as lesser than people with lighter skin and goes through a difficult time both in the black and white community. In the white community, she never sees positive images of women that look like herself and internalizes the idea that in order to be beautiful and gain social status she has to look like the women she sees in the media. The black community reinforces this belief and uses her as their scapegoat. This harshness that Pecola and other dark-skinned black girls go through affects them in troublesome ways and leads to self-destruction.
Conclusion
The aim of this thesis has been to examine how colorism influences the perception young black girls have of themselves depending on their skin tone in Toni Morrison's novel The Bluest Eye. The thesis outlines how the girls are affected both from a social and psychoanalytical perspective, focusing especially on three female characters in the novel, Claudia MacTeer, Maureen Peal and Pecola Breedlove.
This thesis has found that skin tone is important in the African American community and influences young black women’s perception of themselves both at a social and psychological level. The white standard of beauty affects black girls to view their own beauty as non-existent and the standard of beauty in the black community reinforces the belief that lighter skinned black girls are more beautiful than darker skinned ones. When analyzing the novel, the theme of colorism is prevalent in how the light-skinned character is portrayed, Maureen Peal is treated better than the darker skinned characters due to her skin tone. Her skin color allows her to develop feelings of attractiveness and self-worth both from a social and psychoanalytical perspective. Thus, this thesis has found that colorism
works to the advantage of those with lighter skin tones, but it also has a negative impact as there is a risk for those with lighter skin tone to develop a sense of superiority. This can be seen in how Maureen develops a sense of superiority and uses her skin color as a tool against darker skinned girls and as a defense mechanism in order to avoid negative feelings about herself. When it comes to the experiences of those who fall in the middle of the color spectrum, it is shown that colorism functions as both an advantage and a disadvantage. This can be seen in the case of Claudia MacTeer who experiences both the downside of having darker skin and the privilege of being in the middle of the color spectrum. The notion of Claudia’s in- betweenness is prevalent when she is observed next to both Maureen and Pecola.
Next to Maureen’s light skin, her own brown skinned is viewed in a negative light while next to Pecola’s dark skin it is viewed as superior. The experience of seeing both perspectives of colorism allows those of brown skin to develop an understanding of how colorism operates in the African American community.
Claudia’s awareness helps her to have a strong mindset and develop feelings of self- worth as she realizes that she cannot reach the beauty standard that is set for her and learns to accept herself the way she is, in other words, her ego is able to balance between the demands of the id and the superego’s unrealistic ideal self. Which allows Claudia to see herself and others in a realistic way. Finally, for those who fall in the category of dark-skin colorism functions as a tool of oppression and makes it harder to cope with the negative feelings both in a social and psychoanalytical way.
This can be seen in the experiences of Pecola who is used as a scapegoat by the black community due to her dark skin and black features. Pecola’s skin-color affects the perception of herself in a way that leads to serious mental health problems.
Unlike Claudia and Maureen, Pecola cannot avoid the bias that befalls with having
dark-skin, her ego is not able to operate based on the realistic point of view to fulfill the demands of her id, as she develops an obsession and need to have blue eyes. The superego fails as a moral compass and this leads to an imbalance of the structural model of the psyche. Pecola’s skin tone affects her to see herself as worthless and leads to self-destruction. Colorism in the black community is still a taboo topic today but Toni Morrison's novel manages to show the terrible consequences it has on young black women and gives a voice to dark-skinned young women, who are the ones that are hurt the most by it.
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